Since January, 2010, this blog has been dedicated to year-round coverage of the New York theater scene and, particularly, the annual Tony Awards race. The site features commentary on each production and its chances at nominations or wins, with keen insights into voter trends, leading to expert predictions.

Friday, December 23, 2011

It Could Only Happen in the Theater ...

There are some things that can only happen live. The theater has the capacity to create once-in-a-lifetime, "you had to be there" moments that you just can't get anywhere else. The staff of the New York Times arts section were asked what their favorite moments at the theater for 2011 were and these were the results.

DON’T GET TOO COMFORTABLE ... The opening minutes of Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s “Invasion!,” in which two young men in hoodies disrupt the show from the back row of the theater, was so unsettling that audience members almost charged the stage to protect the cast. Definite proof that you can still fool all of the people all of the time. ERIK PIEPENBURG

... OR LOOK TOO CLOSE In Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries” Doug asks his lifelong buddy Kayleen to plug her fingers into his firecracker-smithereened bloody eye socket, just as she’s done with all his other weeping wounds through the years. The blood onstage was probably just corn syrup, but the moment still sent audible shudders through the audience. CATHERINE RAMPELL

MOST SUGGESTIVE DELIVERY The lascivious growl that Liz Mikel packed into the name “Dirty Nasty Shelly” made us both fascinated and terrified to meet this unseen staffer at the Eros Motor Lodge in “Lysistrata Jones” DAVID ROONEY

MOST RIVETING MUSICAL NUMBER ARRIVING ON BROADWAY Three women in headphones move in a slow, dreamy circle singing along to “If You Want Me” in “Once” at New York Theater Workshop and opening at the Jacobs Theater in February. SCOTT HELLER

MOST RIVETING MUSICAL NUMBER DEPARTING BROADWAY Julie Taymor’s original staging of “Boy Falls From the Sky” in “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.” A churning tune, a passel of video supervillains looming larger and larger as they charge forward, Reeve Carney’s impassioned singing as he spins and strikes them down — this was the “rock ’n’ roll circus drama” the show’s creators promised it would be. The same number now has a lot less juice. SCOTT HELLER

BOUNCIEST CHOREOGRAPHY The basketball moves in “Lysistrata Jones” have nothing on “Godspell,” where the choreographer Christopher Gattelli and the director Daniel Goldstein turn “We Beseech Thee” into a pop-rock sugar buzz with Jesus and his followers pogo-ing on small trampolines hidden under the stage. PATRICK HEALY

MOST REMARKABLE STORYTELLER WHO ISN’T MIKE DAISEY Daniel Kitson, a cult favorite in Britain who made a rare United States appearance at St. Ann’s Warehouse with “The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church.” Even after a couple of hours it was hard to tell how much was real, how much was embellished and how much was completely made up in the story of a man who left behind 24 years’ of near-suicide notes. ERIC GRODE

MOST THRILLING TRANSFORMATION Of all the former showgirls recalling their younger, happier days in “Follies,” it’s Jayne Houdyshell’s frumpy, frizzy-haired Hattie Walker who is hard to imagine as a luscious starlet strutting her stuff for Mr. Producer. But when Ms. Houdyshell steps forward and rips into “Broadway Baby,” one of the most memorable tunes Stephen Sondheim ever wrote, we see the flirty, hungry Hattie of yesteryear who would do anything to be in a great big Broadway show. PATRICK HEALY

SECOND MOST THRILLING TRANSFORMATION In the opening scenes of the Broadway play “War Horse,” the main character Albert — as well as many audience members — develop a soft spot for Joey the foal, the adorable horse puppet made of cane, cables and silk. But then comes a nerve-tingling coup de theater: In a moment that marks the passage of time in the play, a fully grown Joey (nine feet high) bursts onto the stage past Joey the foal, as if springing out of the hindquarters of his younger self. PATRICK HEALY

MOST THRILLING TRANSFORMATION (BRICK-AND-MORTAR VARIETY) Not only did the Rattlestick Theater completely reorient its stage to capture the shape of one floor in a Lower East Side tenement for Adam Rapp’s “Hallway Trilogy,” but it also set the futuristic third play, “Nursing,” behind plexiglass, creating a “museum of disease and nursing” through which we watched Logan Marshall-Green suffer the ill effects of plague. SCOTT HELLER

MOST ENCHANTING (AND UNNECESSARY) STAGE EFFECT It wasn’t as dangerous as the Wheel of Death or as bizarre as the giant baby in the pickle jar, but the most jaw-dropping minute in Cirque du Soleil’s “Zarkana” was when 16 upside-down men holding umbrellas slowly ascended from a trap door in the floor up into the fly space without ever dropping their white bowler hats. This Magritte painting come to life had nothing to do with the rest of the show, but who cares? JASON ZINOMAN

GET-A-ROOM PRIZE It wasn’t enough for some dramatists to set a sex scene in a hotel room; this year they actually staged plays in hotels and motels. “Green Eyes” and “HotelMotel” stuffed audiences into spaces so small they could reach out and touch the couples. In “Sleep No More” the invented McKittrick Hotel was decorated with majestically rumpled beds and carnal bathtubs. ERIK PIEPENBURG

PUTTING THE STREET IN STREET THEATER At a climactic moment in Hoi Polloi’s clever adaptation of the John Cassavetes 1959 film classic “Shadows” — staged by Alec Duffy in a former garage in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — a front door slides upward, and the actors, in character, race out onto Metropolitan Avenue, introducing with a rush a vast additional dimension to the play’s jazzy urban ambience. ANDY WEBSTER

MOST CONVINCING JOCK In the year of “Lombardi” and “That Championship Season,” the ferocious Off Off Broadway performer Erin Markey best captured the swagger of a professional athlete in Half Straddle’s all-woman cult hit “In the Pony Palace/Football.” JASON ZINOMAN

BIGGEST LAUGH (EXPECTED) Near the end of “Ghetto Klown” John Leguizamo demonstrated (as if we needed to be told) why phone sex and call waiting don’t mix. Five words: Mom’s on the other line. ERIC GRODE

BIGGEST LAUGH (UNEXPECTED) Nestled in the middle of “Fragments,” Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne’s setting of five short Samuel Beckett pieces, was “Act Without Words II,” an exercise in contrasts between the eternally morose Marcello Magni and the equally vivacious Jos Houben. Technically impeccable, screamingly funny — and totally silent. ERIC GRODE